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Internet Pro Wrestling
Internet Pro Wrestling was an e-fed that existed briefly from July 10 to July 25, 2000. It was created by Captain Jeff Silvers, who also wrestled in the e-fed. The e-fed's highest ranking championship (the IPW World Heavyweight Championship) was resurrected by Silvers in February 2007 to be defended in his MFGG Wrestling. History WWA-Efed.com/f Formation Due to the fact that Silvers did not keep proper offline records at the time, most of Internet Pro Wrestling's history is blurry. What is known for certain is that Silvers founded the e-fed in July 2000 after reading about various systems of pencil-and-paper character-based wrestling simulation. Silvers created his own system and began a website hosted on The Express Page (aka Expage), a former free webhost targeted at beginning webmasters (Silvers was very inexperienced as a webmaster at the time). Silvers did not aggressively promote the e-fed, though he did manage to get a few friends to sign up. The e-fed would book two weekly shows (Monday Mayhem and Wednesday Warfare). It is currently unknown how often pay-per-views were shown (though it's speculated to have been weekly, perhaps every Sunday). On July 10, Silvers announced that as the first wrestler in the e-fed, he was declaring himself the first IPW World Heavyweight Champion. This is regarded as the "official" start date for Internet Pro Wrestling. Dissolution and attempted revival After just over two weeks of existence, Internet Pro Wrestling closed down. Its demise was the result of a small, apathetic roster combined with the amount of time necessary to run just a single match using Silvers' homemade simulation system. On March 25, 2001, Silvers posted an update on the IPW website announcing the return of the e-fed and a tournament to crown a new IPW World Heavyweight Champion, but neither the tournament nor the revival of the federation ever occurred. IPW today In July 2006, Silvers (now a moderator at the Mario Fan Games Galaxy message boards) created MFGG Wrestling, an e-fed open to members of the forums. Silvers used some concepts from IPW--such as the pay-per-view title Deathrow and the concept of an Internet Championship (though the MFGG Internet Championship has no lineage connection to the IPW Internet Championship). Before Silvers settled on a daily format, one of the two weekly shows was to be called MFGG Wednesday Warfare. In February 2007, while writing his article on the eWrestling Encyclopedia, Silvers became interested in finding out what titles he held in his old e-fed (he could not recall offhand). He attempted to find the old IPW website, only to discover that The Express Page was ending its free webhosting service. Pages hosted there would be deleted based on when they were last updated. Unfortunately, Silvers was not aware of this until nearly all pages from the IPW website had been removed. All that remained was the title history page for the IPW World Heavyweight Championship. Silvers copied the information (which revealed that, at the least, he had held the IPW World Heavyweight Championship; he also suspects he held the IPW Internet Championship, but cannot confirm this). He then used the information to create a title history page for the championship at MFGG Wrestling's website for historical reference. Soon thereafter, the idea of introducing a fourth singles championship to the e-fed was brought up. Still feeling nostalgic from his discovery of the IPW World Heavyweight Championship's title history page, Silvers announced that he was reactivating the title (sans "world" status) to be defended in MFGG Wrestling. To make a comparison to "real life" wrestling, IPW is to MFGG as WCW is to WWE; it no longer exists as its own entity, but concepts from it are still being used. Potential MFGG "brand" On April 9, 2007, Captain Jeff Silvers created a post in the MFGG Wrestling topic at the MFGG forums regarding the increasingly large roster, which was becoming a problem. Among his suggestions to rectify this problem was a proposed "roster split" which would see MFGG separated into two distinct brands: X-Degeneration and a revived Internet Pro Wrestling. No decision has been made regarding a potential roster split. Championships With the exception of the World Heavyweight Championship, of which a full and semi-detailed history has remained intact, IPW's title scene is largely unknown (as is most of IPW's history). *''IPW World Heavyweight Championship'' - Big Daddy Cool (Captain Jeff Silvers) awarded himself this title upon the creation of Internet Pro Wrestling; he would go on to lose it to the oddly-named Sgt. Dare Bear the very next day. Sgt. Bear would hold the title for six days before dropping it to Psycho, who remained champion until the promotions's demise eight days later. The title is currently active in MFGG Wrestling after its February 2007 reactivation by Silvers. *''IPW Internet Championship'' - Unlike the World Heavyweight Championship, nothing is known of the Internet Title other than that it existed and that it probably served as a secondary title to the World Heavyweight (it's possibly, though unlikely, that an IPW United States Championship existed which ranked above the Internet Title). Its exact history is presently unknown and has most likely been lost forever. *''Other titles'' - It's possible that other titles existed in IPW, but this can't be confirmed. There may've been a United States Championship, though it's more likely the World Heavyweight and Internet Championships were the only singles titles. There may've also been an IPW Tag Team Championship, but given the limited roster, this is also unlikely. Related image gallery Because almost no artifacts of Internet Pro Wrestling exist other than the IPW World Heavyweight Championship title history and the blurred memories of its founder, the following are recreations of the respective original images, reproduced as accurately as possible. Image:Ipw logo recreation.GIF|Internet Pro Wrestling logo. Image:IPW World Heavyweight Championship.gif|The IPW World Heavyweight Championship.1 Image:IPW Deathrow logo recreation.GIF|''IPW Deathrow'' logo.2 Image:IPW BattleZone logo recreation.GIF|''IPW BattleZone logo.2 1This title was originally represented by a photograph of the "Big Gold" WCW World Heavyweight Championship with the IPW logo pasted at the top. When the title was reintroduced in February 2007, this new image was made to recreate the original belt. 2''Deathrow and BattleZone are believed to have been the two pay-per-views run by IPW. In the case of Deathrow, it was later used by MFGG Wrestling for one of its earlier supershows. Category:MFGG Wrestling Category:Federations formed in 2000 Category:Inactive federations